I really enjoyed Karen King’s piece last week. She is a consummate professional writer and I wish I had half her energy to write across so many genres. That said, I am not entirely a stranger to writing in different styles myself. In a long career of writing and researching across a range of markets, I have had to learn to write everything from what was essentially boiler-plate text round hundreds of tables of (frankly boring) data to bold selling documents designed to convince advertisers that more pages of tables was the most exciting thing they’d seen in years. Some of them believed it and apparently efforts like my discussion of the readers of children’s comics (even probably including some of the ones Karen wrote for) encouraged a lot of advertisers to take more interest in kiddie print media. I even wrote a ‘proper book’ on complaint handling.
Eventually, though, I produced one too many analyses of the market for paper products in the UK (yes, really) and I gave it all up and started writing fiction.
I had dabbled in fiction before – writing some of those ‘choose your own adventure’ stories that were popular in the 1980s.
My first serious attempt at writing a novel was The White Rajah, first published in 2010. Like many first novels, it desperately wanted to be the Great British Novel and like most first novels it wasn’t. It’s been revised a couple of times since and, though it is still hardly the Great British Novel, I am finally happy with it. It has battles and pirates and lots of traditional adventure, but it is at heart an attempt to look at big moral issues. When James Brooke (a real person) died one commentator wrote:
When his Biography comes to be written, there must be in it, dark chapters as well as bright ones.
The Monthly Packet, 14 September 1874
The book looks at how somebody who wanted to do good (and often did) was responsible for some horrific acts. Brooke seems to me to symbolise much about the British Empire: it didn’t set out to be evil, but it did a lot of evil things.
The White Rajah was followed by Cawnpore which will be republished later this summer. Cawnpore is also full of moral complexity. On the one hand you have English colonialists: some trying to do their best for India, some who are deeply contemptuous of the native people. On the other hand you have Nana Sahib, hailed nowadays as a hero of the Indian independence movement, but a man who was responsible for a particularly outrageous massacre in 1857.
The John Williamson trilogy finishes with Back Home (also to be republished in 2021). One reviewer complained that John Williamson is revealed as morally weak. Well, of course he is! The whole series is about the moral choices people make and they sometimes get things right and sometimes not so much. Poor John Williamson tries so hard. He really deserves to find some sort of salvation, but you’ll have to read to the very end to discover if he does.
The White Rajah had an agent and was pitched to leading publishers who turned it down. “Too difficult from an unknown author” more or less summed up the feedback. Sales subsequently proved them right – hence the move to a much more traditional style of historical fiction with the Burke books. There are some moral issues there, but they are generally hidden away behind conventional tales of derring-do with a handsome hero, beautiful women and lots of Frenchmen to beat. (We’re in the Napoleonic Wars, so beating the French comes with the territory.)
Clicking on the covers will take you to Amazon. All my books are available in paperback or on Kindle.
Technically both the John Williamson stories and the James Burke adventures are ‘historical fiction’ but they are distinct sub-genres and are written in dramatically different styles.
Eventually the sheer quantity of research that historical fiction requires made me want to take a bit of a break. I had a couple of ideas for fantasy stories – one about black magic and the other featuring vampires. The result was Dark Magic and Something Wicked. Apparently the genre is called Urban Fantasy. (I had to look it up.) It’s not just a different subject matter, but a tighter writing style – and an opportunity to give my dark sense of humour full rein.
Every sort of writing brings different challenges and different rewards, but I’ve enjoyed them all. I can only agree with Karen that challenging yourself to write in unfamiliar genres is always worthwhile.
This is a sequel to The Assassins and you really ought to read that book first.
There is quite a lot happens in The Dardanelles Conspiracy, all of it based on the historical facts that led up to the horror of the Gallipoli landings. If, like me, you are vaguely aware of that campaign but have never been quite sure how it came about, then this book will give you a lot of context. It falls into two parts, the first about the doomed attempts to bribe Turkey to allow the passage of the Dardanelles without the British having to take military action, and the second a description of the opening of the campaign when the negotiations fail. The failure, according to this book, was pretty well inevitable as the British did not negotiate in good faith.
The details of opaque diplomatic negotiations are, inevitably, on the dry side. What kept me reading (and, I imagine, anyone else who loved The Assassins) was following the continuing escapades of Johnny Swift, the anti-hero of Bardos’s previous book. Johnny continues to duck and dive, a cad and a bounder but someone we somehow want to win through, whether he is collaborating with the enemy, faking illness to extend his sick leave or seducing his superior’s wives. Several of the people from the first book also make welcome returns alongside some wonderful new fictional characters – in particular a couple of German officers whose almost constant drunkenness conceals a strong commitment to their military duty.
There is a good cast of non-fictional figures too. A young Churchill reminds us that Winston was a terrible military leader in World War I, though fortunately rather better a quarter of a century later. I never knew he had a brother in the Dardanelles and Jack Churchill was just one of the interesting historical figures to pass through the story.
Once we move to the actual assault on the Turkish positions, there is nothing dry at all about the story-telling. Bardos gives a good outline of how the battle started. It’s clear how much of British strategy was based on straightforwardly racist contempt for the Turks. A few snowflakes reading Guardian articles on the commitment of Turkish soldiery to defend their homeland could have saved an awful lot of British lives. ANZAC lives too, though Bardos makes little mention of them. He would be well advised not to agree to any book tours in Australia where the sacrifice of “colonial” troops at Gallipoli remains a source of bitterness to this day.
Bardos catches the horror and the chaos of this sort of warfare really well: the chaos, perhaps, rather too well. The initial plan of attack was insanely complicated (the sort of thing that a junior officer nowadays would be taught could never survive contact with the enemy). Without a map the reader will struggle to keep track of the relative positions of the troops on Beaches V, X and Z, let alone the strategic importance of Hill 138 or Hill 114. Mind you, the reader’s confusion will reflect that of the men on the ground. The commanders, safe offshore in their battleships, did have maps but, with no efficient means of communication, they lost direction of their forces. The result was a bloodbath and Bardos captures that very well.
The book takes a very Reithian approach to combining fact and fiction. (Like Reith’s BBC, it entertains, educates and informs.) If The Dardanelles Conspiracy doesn’t combine fact and fiction as seamlessly as The Assassins, that reflects just how good The Assassins was. If you enjoyed The Assassins, you will enjoy the further adventures of Johnny Swift and Bardos’s insights into a campaign which is too easily forgotten about in Britain.
I’ve never met Karen King, but she’s one of those people you meet online and come to see as a friend. She is always amazingly supportive and I would be happy to give her space on my blog to promote her next book, pretty much whatever she was writing about. But she’s chosen a subject close to my heart at the moment: writing across genres.
I came from a background in writing for business – not something that most people think of as “writing” but actually one of the easiest ways to make money in this business. Once I started writing fiction, though, I was encouraged to stick to one genre – in my case, historical novels. Just lately I’ve branched out into contemporary fantasy, with books like Something Wicked. It’s interesting moving into a new field and having to adapt the way you write. Karen has a lifetime’s experience of this and her thoughts are well worth reading if you are an author looking for new challenges.
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I’ve been a published writer for over thirty five years and whilst nowadays I mainly write romantic novels and psychological thrillers, I started my writing career working on teenage and children’s magazines. I was first published by the iconic Jackie teen magazine way back in the early eighties. I wrote several photo strip love stories and short articles and, as I had no experience on writing photo strips, I went about it by studying several issues and learning the format, how many frames per page, how many words per frame, etc. However, it was when I started writing for younger children’s magazines that I got my big break and was able to earn a living as a writer. I’ve written comic strips, short stories, activities and quizzes for a variety of magazines – Thomas the Tank Engine,My Little Pony, Winnie the Pooh, Barbie and Sindy – all things I had never done before, but each time I was asked to write something different I said yes and studied sample scripts to learn how it was done. And it paid off. Writing for children’s magazines earned me a regular income for several years.
Writing for a living sounds a dream come true to writers who are struggling to get published, but it comes with its own problems. Once writing becomes your job, your way of earning an income, then you stop writing for the fun of it and start writing what pays the bills. Which means that you accept – or try to accept – whatever work you are offered and focus on writing for the commercial market. One of my mantras is ‘never be scared to try something new’. I was always willing to have an attempt at anything, writing-wise. I’ve written picture books, story books, activity books, joke books, educational readers, young adult novels and even a folder of 27 plays – that was a tough one, especially the accompanying teacher’s notes, but I did it.
Whenever I write for a new market or genre my mantra is ‘know your market know your reader.’ I study the market, read other books in the genre I am writing to get a feel of the characters and story plots that are popular, and think about my reader. I ask myself questions such as: what are my readers expecting from the story? What age group are they? What are they interested in? This was especially important when I was writing for children, as the younger the age group the simpler the storyline and vocabulary, but it can also be applied when writing in different genres for adults because readers of crime thrillers, for example, will expect different things from the story than readers of fantasy. Nowadays I write romance novels, and more recently, psychological thrillers, but I still abide by the ‘know your market, know your reader’ mantra.
When I had my debut psychological thriller, The Stranger in my Bed, published last November, a lot of people were surprised at me going over to the ‘darkside’ after writing ‘sparkly’ romances for the last decade, but to me it isn’t that much different. The way I see it is that I write about relationships. My romance novels are stories of relationships that (eventually) go right and my psychological thrillers are about relationships that go drastically wrong, whether it be husband and wife, mother and child, siblings, etc. With a romance novel it’s all about the emotional journey of the heroine – and hero. The reader knows – and expects – a HEA (happy ever after) – even if only for now) and they read the story to find out how the heroine and hero get there. The twists and turns are the obstacles that get thrown in the couple’s path which they have to overcome to be together. Whereas at the core of the psychological thriller there is usually a mystery to solve – who is the abuser, who has kidnapped the child, can you trust this woman/man? etc – and the story is full of twists and turns. The reader should be kept guessing right until the unexpected and, if possible, jaw dropping ending. The thing I found most difficult about writing The Stranger in my Bed was timing the twists and reveals to keep them going throughout the whole story, which often meant I had to change the order of chapters about so that events happened earlier, or later, than I had originally planned.
My latest novel is once again a romance novel, One Summer in Cornwall, set in the gorgeous Cornish town of Port Medden where one of my earlier romance novels, The Cornish Hotel by the Sea, is set. The Cornish Hotel by the Sea became an Amazon bestseller both in the UK and USA so I was delighted to write a sequel featuring some old favourites, and bringing in some new characters too.
Many people dismiss romance novels as being unrealistic escapism but I disagree. Romance novels are about the complexities of human relationships, the highs and lows of being in love, which most people can identify with. Most of us have been in love at least once in our lives so can relate to the experience. I wrote an article about this for Women Writers, Women’s Books called The Realism in Romance. You can read it here if you’re interested: https://booksbywomen.org/the-realism-in-romance-by-karen-king/
When I sold my article to Jackie magazine all those years ago I’d never have guessed that I’d have 120 children’s books, two young adult novels, several short stories, nine romance novels (with another two in the pipeline) and a psychological thriller published. So if you fancy writing in a different genre, go for it. You never know what you can do until you try!
One Summer in Cornwall
Escape to Cornwall this summer…
A gorgeous feel-good read, perfect for fans of CATHY BRAMLEY and PHILLIPA ASHLEY.
When Hattie is made redundant and evicted from her flat in one horrible week, she needs time to rethink. Her Uncle Albert left her and her father each half of Fisherman’s Rest, his home in the Cornish town of Port Medden, so this seems the perfect place to escape to until she can figure things out.
As Hattie stays in the cottage, clearing it out, tidying it up and getting it ready to sell, she starts to find her feet in Port Medden and making a new home here begins to feel right. If only her dad didn’t need a quick sale and things weren’t complicated by her unwelcoming neighbour Marcus . . .
Karen King is a multi-published author of both adult and children’s books. She has had nine romantic novels published, one psychological thriller with another one out later this year, 120 children’s books, two young adult novels, and several short stories for women’s magazines. Her romantic novel The Cornish Hotel by the Sea became an international bestseller, reaching the top one hundred in the Kindle charts in both the UK and Australia. Karen is a member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association, the Society of Authors and the Society of Women Writers and Journalists. Karen now lives in Spain where she loves to spend her non-writing time exploring the quaint local towns with her husband, Dave, when she isn’t sunbathing or swimming in the pool, that is.
I do love the new cover for The White Rajah. It’s another by Dave Slaney, who consistently produces lovely work. This one features a kris, a traditional weapon of South East Asia. The White Rajah is set in Borneo where the native Dyaks are under the rule of Malays. The Malays traditionally carry the kris and kris do feature quite a lot in the story. I’ve blogged about them before, but perhaps it’s time to revisit the subject.
I first came across kris on holiday in Borneo. This was the holiday where I discovered James Brooke, so kris and Brooke have always been linked in my mind.
What exactly are kris? Most are really too long to be called daggers but too short for swords. In the UK they’re usually depicted (as in the cover illustration) as wavy, though they come in a variety of shapes and sizes with marked differences from one area to another. Some old kris are as small as any dagger and the largest are the size of a sword. There isn’t even any agreement about how it should be spelt. Although ‘kris’ is the usual English spelling, I have also often seen it spelt ‘keris’. Wikipedia throws up even more variants: ‘cryse’, ‘crise’, ‘criss’, ‘kriss’ and ‘creese’, although these appear obsolete terms used by European colonists. Generally, the usual spelling in the West is ‘kris’, while ‘keris’ is more popular in the East.
Despite the variety of spellings, sizes and shapes, kris are easy to recognise. What are the attributes that define them?
The blade
The first thing is that all kris have, to a greater or lesser extent, “watered” blades. I’m going to write a lot more about this in a separate post, which is likely to appeal to a more specialist audience, but for now I’ll just say that the watering here is produced by a technique called ‘pattern welding’. Although the pattern can resemble that seen in the famed damascene steel, these blades are produced by a completely different technique and are vastly inferior in quality. They are quite beautiful though.
Some legends say that this pattern, known as the “pamor”, is made by the waves of the hair of a spirit inhabiting the blade. In fact, the waves are the result of the kris being made from thin bars of iron or steel which are beaten together. I’ll be writing separately about how these and other blades are made in a post for sword/metallurgy geeks.
The top of blade is wider on one side, maintaining a sharp edge. The other side is decorated with a curl in the metal, which resembles an elephant’s trunk (the ‘belalai gajah’). A good example of this is shown in figure 2.
FIG 2. Detail of a Kris Ksay Cantrik from Jogjakarta, Java.
The widening of the blade allows it to form a guard (the ‘ganja’).
Some people suggest that the shape is derived from the shape of a stingray’s ‘sting’. The idea is that people used the sting as a weapon and then produced metal weapons based on the same shape. Unlikely as it is, the oldest kris are very small and thin and the resemblance there is more marked.
The details of the decoration at the top of blade vary considerably.
The tang (the bit of the blade that fits into the hilt) is very narrow. This is a significant weakness of the kris as a weapon. European sailors fighting natives armed with kris would typically use a belaying pin (essentially a large, heavy stick) to disarm their opponents by striking the kris blade, which would snap at the tang.
The hilt
The hilts are usually made of wood, often kemuning, which some people claim has magical qualities. Weapons owned as status symbols may well have hilts of horn, ivory (elephant or walrus) or bone.
The hilts of kris are always carved into symbolic decorations, often with a religious element. Many hilts represent the garuda bird, which carries the god Vishnu in Hindu myth. Sometimes these images are elaborate, but, in many cases, they are very stylised and can appear quite plain. Examples of two extremes of decorative style are shown below.
Although the most common image is that of a more or less stylised garuda, other patterns are seen. Sometimes, the figure is that of a crouching man. The Erotic Museum in Berlin has several examples of hilts which represent people engaged in sexual acts.
A particularly interesting type of hilt istajong, known in the West as a “Kingfisher” hilt. This is characterised by a long “beak” extending from the end of the hilt. Carving these takes considerable skill, and such hilts are rare. The workmanship would have made them valued when they were originally produced, but their scarcity nowadays means that they are worth considerable sums to collectors.
Although Western collectors attach great significance to the hilts, it is important to remember that the culture is that produced the kris saw the true magic and value of the weapon as lying in the blade. The blade will be preserved as the furniture is changed. This is particularly the case with kris that have been traded by collectors. It is common for hilts to be removed from blades so that a particularly good hilt can be matched with a particularly good blade to make a more saleable piece.
The sheath
Kris sheaths are also distinctive. Sheaths are made of wood, although they may be covered with a metal sleeve. The end of the sheath might be tipped with a chap of bone or ivory (thebuntut). They are distinguished by a wide wooden crosspiece (thesampir) which protects the guard of the weapon. This is often described as “boat shaped”. Thesampirmay be a relatively functional rectilinear shape or an elaborately carved piece of decorative work.
Scabbard with metal sleeve. Jogjakarta.
The kris as a spiritual object
Kris are valued as spiritual objects. Although there is some uncertainty surrounding their origin, it is likely that the very first kris were thekris majapahit. ‘Majapahit‘ refers to the Majapahit Empire, which was based on Java in the 14th to 15th centuries. The very first kris were made when iron was a rare and precious metal. Early kris may well have been made of meteoric iron. They were very small, and may have been intended for use in religious ceremonies, rather than combat. The symbolic carving of the hilts reflects their continuing religious links.
Kris majapahit
Traditionally, the manufacture of kris was surrounded with ceremonies reflecting the fact that the early smiths were practising an art which was viewed as as much magical as technological. Some stories say that women smiths would temper the blade by drawing the red hot metal through their vulva before throwing it into water. Another version says that every kris would be tempered by being stabbed into the body of a prisoner, so that a person would be killed for every kris that was made.
Although kris are functionally defined by their use as weapons, they have always been much more than that. Often beautifully decorated (sometimes with gold worked into the surface of the blade) and with hilts and scabbards so ornate as to make them almost useless for fighting, kris are symbols of status, and of craft and cultural values at least 700 years old. Collected enthusiastically by Europeans (especially the Dutch), they can still be found and bought at affordable prices in the markets of Malaysia and Indonesia. The huge variety of styles and the stories that go with them make these a source of continual fascination to any traveller in the region.
FURTHER READING
Draeger and Smith (1986) Comprehensive Asian Fighting Arts. Kodansha America, Inc
Gardner (1936) Keris and Other Malay Weapons . Progressive Publishing Company: Singapore
Hill (1956) The Keris and Other Malay Weapons, Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 29, Part 4, No. 176.
About ‘The White Rajah’
The White Rajah is the first of three books about John Williamson. Williamson is a fictional character, but his adventures take him into the lives of some very real historical figures.The White Rajahis quite closely based on the life of Sir James Brooke. Like the true story of his life, it raises issues about colonialism and our attitudes to what we now call Third World countries. But like his life, it also has pirates and rebellions and battles. And there’s an orang-utan who, if I’m entirely honest, probably wasn’t there in real life. It took quite a long time to research and write and is available for pre-order on Kindle at £3.99. You can use this book link to buy it, wherever you are in the world. Please do.
I hope you all saw last Friday’s blog post with my news of the republication of The White Rajah and the lovely new cover. Now it’s time to tell you more about what you get when you buy the book.
The White Rajah is based around the life of James Brooke of Sarawak. An English adventurer, he arrived in Borneo in 1839 and became embroiled in a civil war that was going on there. Although he had only 28 men and six small cannon on his ship, his intervention in the war proved crucial. After it was over, he was rewarded with the rule of one of the provinces there and he became the Rajah of Sarawak, starting a dynasty that lasted three generations and which was known as ‘The White Rajahs’.
James Brooke was almost the ideal Victorian hero and his exploits inspired Conrad’s Lord Jim. It’s not surprising that his adventures, with headhunters and pirates, battles in the jungle, and intrigue with Sarawak’s Malay nobility, have long been considered as the basis for a film. Errol Flynn tried to get such a movie made back in the 1930s (with him as the star, of course). Since then there have been several more attempts, but now one is finally to see the light of day. Sadly, covid means that End of the World will go straight to DVD, but it does look like a spectacular film, even though it may not be that careful of historical fact. (The posters say it is “The true story that inspired The Man Who Would Be King,” which is rather stretching a point to start off with.)
I’m hoping that interest in the film will generate more interest in my book, which sticks reasonably closely to the facts (and reasonable conjecture) about James Brooke’s life. The book may also interest readers who think that there must be more to the arguments about the British Empire than ‘The British Empire was an unmitigated Good’ vs ‘The British Empire was an unmitigated Evil’. Brooke’s rule (and especially the main incidents in my book) captures the ambiguity of British rule. As the epigram in my book (written at the time of his death) says:
‘When his Biography comes to be written, there must be in it, dark chapters as well as bright ones, but while those who loved him the best, could fondly and sadly wish it had been otherwise, they will ever be able to think of their leader, as the Father and Founder of a nation and as one of England’s greatest sons.’
The Monthly Packet, 14 September 1874
The White Rajah was the first book I ever wrote and, unlike the others, it has undergone significant revisions between editions. This edition, though, is identical to the one published by Endeavour/Lume Books, because I think I have finally got the book I meant to write. It will be published on 21 May, but it is already available for pre-order at https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B092XZCZDC
Last year I was asked to write a short story for a collection of stories set in Victoria’s reign. I always wanted to write some short stories of Brooke rule in Sarawak, so I produced a tale about a tiger hunt. Like The White Rajah, it is told by Brooke’s (fictional) companion, John Williamson. If you want a feel for the sort of book The White Rajah is, you might like to read it. It’s just 4,200 words and it’s available on Smashwords at 99p but you can get a free copy (via a Smashwords voucher) if you sign up to my newsletter.
